Step to Fitness and Overall Wellbeing

There are ways to measure your food intake & activity level.  You can journal it, what you do, how long you do it & how much you eat.  You can do it the old fashioned way by writing it on a piece of paper.  For the more tech savvy among you, you can log it all in on My Fitness Pal or a variety of other apps.  This is the one that I use and I have found it to be easy and great for accountability with friends.  It also interacts with other apps.


When tracking your activity, you can log your workouts but also I am motivated to talk today about keeping track of your steps.  You can do this with an inexpensive Pedometer or treat yourself to something a little more high tech like Fitbit.
Marc and I celebrated our 19th anniversary with one of the Fitbits each.  These are simply wrist bands that you wear and it keeps up with your steps, your activity level, even your quality of sleep.  The great thing about it is it relates my calories burned into Myfitnesspal app.
Regardless how you track the information, the rule of thumb is this, calories in versus calories out.  You consume calories as potential energy to use. It would be great if the ole saying applied here "if you don't use it, you lose it".  However, that is not the case.  Regarding calories, if you don't use it -- you store it for later!
My suggestion is the following:
Whether you want to just stay healthy or if your goal is to lose some of that "Stored for later" calories, try to get in 10,000 steps per day.
If you want to use up those "stored for later" calories, set your goal weight.  If you are within 10-20 pounds of that goal, take the goal number and add a zero to the end.  Let that be your estimated number of calories for the day.  
Based on calories burned vs. calories consumed, try to create a 500 calorie deficit each day which will equate to you losing 1 pound per week. Double that and you double the loss, but no more than 2 pounds per week. OK, this means, burn more calories than you take in.  (ex. if I weigh 150 and my goal is 130 then I would either consume 1300 calories per day if I just want to lose weight by controlling my calories.  If I want to effect it by activity, I would want to increase my activity to use more calories than I consume.  Meaning I can eat more than mentioned above, but I would still need to create that same deficit.)  for more information Calories Burned at Rest: How many Calories do I Burn doing Nothing








And for those Christians that read my blog, remember that you are the temple of the Holy Spirit.  Just as the priest took care of the temple, we too are to take care of the dwelling place of the Spirit of God.